Simplify Your Life With Kids : 100 Ways to make Family Life Easier and More Fun

Reading a book on the home, and taking care of your children is good because it refreshes your mind in that area. This book is full of great ideas! If you only walked away with one good idea it would be worth the read.

Organizing our lives are difficult enough, but adding kids to the equation makes it almost impossible! This book offers practical solutions and advice on how to get organized so you've got more time to do what's really important - spend with your kids! The chapters are short and the language is easy to read which is great for those of us who are sleep deprived or just short on time. I highly recommend this book!

Short helpful hints. Well-written. Highly recommend for parents, grandparents, teachers, sitters.

I like the ideas in this book. Everything seems pretty easy to implement. It is a little dated as it talks about walkmans etc. but it is all relative. If you want a book that attempts to simplify your life from cell phones, text or e-mail, this topic is not specifically addressed.

It is great book for any one with kids. I read it and gave it to my daughter. There are many useful ideas that we both can use. A very helpful book.

Excellent

I guess this book falls into the category of "never take parenting advice from someone who never had children". I bought this book because I LOVED "Simplify your life" by this author. I found it very helpful. This book, however, was mostly confounding and fairly depressing. While St. James *did* seek out advice from her friends who had children, these friends apparently take a very 'hands off' approach to their kids.The book opens with a scenario in which a mother has forgotten to pick up her child and the child is stranded somewhere late in the evening while she tries to figure out a way to get someone else to go pick him up now that she's home and needs to make dinner. This did not bode well for the rest of the book [for those of us who don't routinely completely forget about our children and leave them alone in public places late at night....]Much of the advice in this book falls into the category of "simplify your life with children by paying someone else to deal with the little brats". There is much about how parents should put their children in day care all day [and don't EVER let your child think they have the ability to cause you to delay your departure because of their pathetic tears, etc, etc, etc] and then get a sitter to care for the children in the evenings so mom can have "Me" time and parents can have "Us" time. Apparently, if you schedule 2 hours of "quality time" on Sunday afternoon with your kids, that's really all they need.There was also a big push to teach the kids "self sufficiency" - as in, your 5 year old really can get his own breakfast so he doesn't "bother" you. I'm all for self sufficient kids and encouraging my children to be strong and independant, but too much of this book was geared towards forcing your kids to basically survive without any parental assistance or interaction - yeah... I guess that would be simplier than actually caring for your kids yourself. At least until they turn 13 and get put in jail for shooting up the school or something.There were a few good ideas in this book, but not nearly enough to warrant wading through all the bad parenting advice and depressing disregard for children's well being. "Shelter for the Spirit" by Victoria Moran includes some great chapters on re-prioritizing and simplifying that are very child-friendly and would lead to strong parent-child relationships. In my opinion, parents would do better to read what Moran has to say and skip this particular book by St. James.

I am a facilitator of a Single Parenting class and am always reading books about parenting. I just finished re-reading this book and I couldn't agree more with what it contains. I purchased it for myself when my children were preschoolers and have implimented many of the ideas written within in raising my children.I am now a widow and so am "going it alone" in the raising of my two children. We have been through a lot in the last 3 years, but the general principles described in this book are what have allowed us to get through and come out the other side a whole, well adjusted family. This book gives excellent, practical suggests on how to achieve a home and family life that reflects the core values of a loving and respectful family. That is exactly what I want for my home.I am very surprised at the 1 star reviews as many of the comments that they make seem to indicate that they only read the first little bit of the book. If you read through the book in it's entirety it's main focus is on increasing the quality and quantity of your time with your children, which is the opposite of what the 1 star reviews seem to have gotten from the book.I like it so well, the reason I am on this site is because I am going to purchase several more copies for the parents of my single parenting group!